In recognition of our mutual interest in documentary and fine art photography, Daylight Magazine and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University have started an international competition, the Daylight/CDS Photo Awards, to honor and promote talented and committed photographers, both emerging and established.

Two awards, a PROJECT PRIZE and a WORK-IN-PROCESS PRIZE.

Project Prize:

Submit: 20 pieces

Deadline: 06/01/2010

Fee: $60

For an extended documentary project or fine art series. Edit photographs with care as the project photographs will be judged on the coherence of the work as a whole. The full panel of jurors will choose one First Prize Winner (to receive a solo exhibition at CDS, a Daylight Multimedia feature, produciton stipend and more!). Each Guest Juror will also select one photographer to receive a Juror’s Pick Prize and write a short statement about why he or she chose the work.

Work-in-process prize:

Submit: 5-10 pieces

Deadline: 06/01/2010

Fee: $30

For a documentary or fine art essay/work-in-progress from a single body of images The full panel of jurors will choose one First Prize Winner (to be featured in print via Daylight Magazine and CDS’ ‘Document,’ included in a group exhibition at CDS, and more!). Each Guest Juror will also select one photographer to receive a Juror’s Pick Prize and write a short statement about why he or she chose the work.

“Made by Will – Selections From Four Portfolios May 7 (Opening Reception 6-8)- June 27, 2010

This show is about how photographs are a reflection of their maker. Comprised of self-portraits, studies, environmental portraits, and busts, Made by Will, on view in Houston Center for Photography´s main gallery this spring, contains seminal works made by the photographer Will Michels in the last 15 years. Antecedents are also included, along with supporting documents such as the photographer´s journals and sketches.

Native Houstonian Will Michels (b. 1968) has been making pictures for over twenty-five years. During his teenage years and early twenties while at Glassell, HSPVA and Pratt Institute Michels´ compositions were mainly architectural and his subjects had strong references to destruction. In his final year of architecture school, Michels began to merge architecture, photography and himself, often in homage to Josef Albers and the square. In his early 20s, he began to make series of portraits. Since 1995, the photographer has worked at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston where he helps to digitize the permanent collection, curates and teaches aspiring photographers — all experiences which have enriched his own photography over the years.”

On May 27th Will Michels will give a tour of his exhibition and an artist talk starting at 7 p.m. at HCP.

My colleague Darius Himes and I are busy preparing to teach a one-week workshop on publishing. It will be an in-depth look at the process of publishing a book of your photographs, from clarifying your concept, researching appropriate publishers, creating a publication proposal, and interpreting contracts. At that point, if you are not happy with the offer you may wish to consider self-publishing, so we will compare and contrast the issues surrounding ‘to be published or self-publish.’ Our lectures will then address the process of editing, design, pre-press… and creating a marketing strategy for your book, including planning for in-person and web launch, and related exhibition(s). We will combine classroom lectures with site visits to book publishers, editors, designers and book sellers, which the Santa Fe community is rich with. Lastly, each of the participants will have a consultation with Darius and myself to discuss their project. And, as is always the case with Santa Fe Workshops in the summer, we will have on campus a host of outstanding artists as faculty, including Sam Abell, Christopher James and Arthur Meyerson, all of whom will be giving lectures to the the entire community (faculty lectures on June 21 & 22 are free and open to the public).

If you hope for a book of your photographs in your career, join us!

Registration is limited to 14; several spaces remain open. Click here to register. Darius and I look forward to knowing you and your project better!

PS: The weekend of the 18-19-20th is the opening of THE DISSOLVE, the SITE SANTA FE’s 8th International Biennial. Events include panel discussions, Bill T. Jones performance at the Lensic, and public opening on the afternoon of the 20th prior to the start of our workshop at 6 p.m.

“This intimate family album is a revealing photographic look at the Beat Generation as chronicled by the movement’s great poet Allen Ginsberg.

Allen Ginsberg began photographing in the late 1940s when he purchased a small, second-hand Kodak camera. For the next fifteen years he took photographs of himself, his friends, and lovers, including the writers and poets Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso as well as Beat personality Neal Cassady. He abandoned photography in 1963 and took it up again in the 1980s, when he was encouraged by photographers Berenice Abbott and Robert Frank to reprint his earlier work and make new portraits; these included more images of longtime friends as well other acquaintances such as painters Larry Rivers and Francesco Clemente and musician Bob Dylan. Ginsberg’s photographs form a compelling portrait of the Beat and counterculture generation from the 1950s to the 1990s. Far more than historical documents, his photographs and the extensive inscriptions he added to them years later preserve what he referred to as “the sacredness of the moment,” the often joyous communion of friends and the poignancy of looking back to intensely felt times.

More than seventy prints are brilliantly reproduced in this book and accompanied by Sarah Greenough’s essay on Ginsberg’s photography in relation to his poetry and other photographers of the time, a chronology of his photographic activity, and selections from interviews with Ginsberg between 1958 and 1996.

Sarah Greenough is senior curator and head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

“May 20th-June 26th, Opening: May 20th, 2010 4:00-7:30pm at the Fifty Crows Gallery in San Francisco.

Julie- For the last 16 years Darcy Padilla has been documenting the life of an AIDS-afflicted woman, Julie Baird. Julie has been on her own since her sexually abusive stepfather threw her through a glass window when she was 14 years old. She ran away from home, lived on the street, used drugs, contracted HIV, and had five children. When I first met Julie in February 1993 in the lobby of a SRO hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, she was 18 years old and had just given birth to her first child, Rachel. Julie and Jack Fyffe, the 19 year-old father were both HIV positive. Rachel, they said, was their main reason for living. Throughout the years, Darcy Padilla has photographed Julie’s complex story of AIDS, abusive relationships, drug use, multiple homes and poverty. A victim of child abuse, Julie often neglected her own children. A high school dropout, she depends on welfare to feed her family. HIV-Positive, she fights to stay off drugs. Julie’s is a story of a survivor. The telling of it enriches the understanding of the poorest and most desperate among us. I am continuing to document Julie’s life and it is my fervent hope that Julie’s story inspires a greater awareness of the plight of people like her.

“David Maisel: “Black Maps” Registration for this event will go live Wednesday, May 12, 12pm PT and Thursday, May 13, 9:30am PT.

For more than twenty years, David Maisel has been making aerial photographs of sites of environmental impact. This extended series, called Black Maps, shows the undoing of the natural world by wide-scaled human intervention in the landscape. His images of zones where the natural order has been eradicated are both spectacular and horrifying. Although Maisel’s photographs evidence the devastation of these locations, they also transcribe interior, psychic landscapes—for, as otherworldly and surreal as these images appear, they depict shattered realities of our own making. The forms of environmental disquiet and degradation function on a metaphorical level, and the aerial perspective enables one to experience the landscape like a vast map of its undoing. Black Maps has unfolded in chapters, focusing on such subjects as strip-mines, clear-cuts, leaching fields, tailings ponds, and firestorms. The Lake Project (2001-2003) is comprised of images made in the vicinity of Owens Lake in California, which was drained and depleted to bring water to the desert city of Los Angeles, and which became an enormous environmental disaster in this process. Terminal Mirage (2003-2005) uses aerial images made at the site of the Great Salt Lake as a means to explore both abstraction and, as the curator Anne Tucker has written about this series, “the disturbingly engaging duality between beauty and repulsion.”

David Maisel was born in New York City in 1961. He received his BA from Princeton University and his MFA from California College of the Arts, in addition to study at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He was a 2007 Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, and a 2008 Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Maisel is represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and others. His monograph The Lake Project (Nazraeli Press, 2004), was selected as one of the Top 25 Photography Books of 2004 by the critic Vince Aletti. His second monograph, Oblivion (Nazraeli Press, 2006), depicts tonally-reversed black and white aerial views of Los Angeles.”